singles from "The Fame," Lady Gagàs
first album, from 2008, have gone to
No.1 on the Billboard chart-a re-
markable, first-ever feat for a début
effort.
Inside the hall's Art Deco lobby, club
kids and drag queens mingled with Trey
Anastasio, the guitarist from Phish, and
Donald Trump. A five-year-old girl in
full Gaga regalia-black unitard, big
sparkly shoulder pads, blond wig, and
rhinestoned biker's hat, a sort of Jon-
Benet Ramsey of pop-posed for pic-
tures like a pro. A glam -rock band called
Semi Precious Weapons opened the
show. The male lead singer wore a gold
miniskirt and fishnets, both of which he
removed during the performance. His
purpose: "T 0 get you filthy whores wet
and excited for Lady Gaga!" One won-
dered what the heroic daddies made of
that.
Lady Gaga went on just after nine.
For the first couple of songs, she was
half hidden behind scrims and sets, but,
by the time she did the first of her No.1
hits, "Just Dance," she was in full view.
Madonna, to whom Lady Gaga is some-
times clumsily compared, is known for
changing her look with each tour; Lady
Gaga changed her look eight times in
the course of the evening: her outfits in-
cluded bronze Cleopatra-like armor,
with a gold wrecking-ball accessory, a
red vinyl pushup bra, matching panties,
and a red chauffeur's hat.
The spectacle sustained the show,
which jumped during the hits but
dragged in the middle. Between num-
bers, Gaga talked to the audience-her
new reflection. She recalled playing" at
a bar with ten people that smelled like
urine, on Bleecker," adding, "I'm not
going to lie-I kind of miss playing at
those bars sometimes. All the time." At
another point, she cried, "I was a wait-
ress on Cornelia Street and now I'm liv-
ing my dream forever!" Lying belly
down on the stage, she asked in a little-
girl voice, "Do you think I'm sexy?"
The response was thunderous-
"Yeah!" -but apparently it was not
enough.
"I'm like Tinker Bell," Gaga said.
"You know how, with Tinker Bell, if
you don't applaud her, her light goes
out? Speak for me! Do you want me to
d .
"
Ie.
She also served up dollops of self-
help, offering her own apotheosis as an
inspirational parable for her fans. "Don't
ever let anyone tell you you can't be any-
thing you want to be," she said. "I felt
like a freak in high school, and then one
day I wrote a song that changed my
life." It was an early version of her hit
" p L F "
OKer ace.
Gaga's father, Joseph Germanotta,
an Internet entrepreneur who these days
works for his daughter, was in the audi-
ence. Lady Gaga, now dressed in a huge
stole made of crow feathers, acknowl-
edged his presence, saying, "Hi, Dad!"
The Jumbotron screen caught him with
his eyes closed, as though he couldn't
watch.
-John Seabrook
HELL NO DEPT.
FR.EE BR.AD
j r-.'" I II1 I:
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B rad Hampton used to live in what
h all " "
e c s a super-cute apartment on
Greenwich Avenue at Jane. It was, ac-
cording to an ad he posted on Craigslist,
"a one-of-a-kind, cozy, furnished garret
studio hideaway': futon, daybed, custom
cabinets, private roof deck. In October
of 2008, he found a better place in the
neighborhood. He decided to sublet the
studio for twenty-two hundred dollars a
month to a friend of a friend of the art-
ist and musician Laurie Anderson,
whose studio he manages. "I just didn't
have time to deal," Hampton said, of the
illegal sublet. Hè s a painter; he was join-
ing Anderson on tour in Europe. "It was
like, 'Oh, shès a filmmaker, shès got a
trust fund, you'll love her,'" he said, of
the new tenant. "Since she came recom-
mended through someone Laurie knew,
it was a no-brainer."
Hampton was going over all of this
one recent afternoon in a vegan coffee
shop called Soy Luck Club. It is across
the street from his old apartment, where
the subtenant had been living for seven
and a half months, while failing to pay
rent for six of them. Hampton, who has
peroxided hair, styled in a modified Cae-
sar, thumbed the screen of his iPhone.
He was wearing a shiny black parka, jig-
gling the ice in his coffee. "Her checks
started bouncing, so I started down the
road of covering her," he said. 'When I
hit ten thousand this fall-I'm liquidat-
ing my savings account now-I told
her, 'You've bankrupted me.'" (The way
the subtenant tells it, she stopped pay-
ing rent after Hampton failed to pay
the landlord promptly.) Hampton and
the subtenant traded rounds of ultima-
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Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson
tums. Hampton got a lawyer. His paint-
ings, he said, "started getting very com-
plicated-weird, noxious colors, very
Orwellian, all these endless tunnels that
just interconnect." He had left some
Japanese maples on the roof deck. "All
summer, she's supposed to water the
trees, right? I come by, and theyre all
dead."
In November, a housing-court settle-
ment held that the subtenant was re-
sponsible for fifty-four hundred dollars
of the rent (Hampton would have to
foot the rest), and that she had to vacate
the apartment by December 15th.
Hampton went to his job at Anderson's
studio after the hearing and poured out
his story. Anderson took it as a call to
action. 'We said, We have to do some-
thing!'" Anderson recalled, sounding
like the Emma Goldman of West Vil-
lage real-estate squabbles. " We can't
just sit around and watch this happen.'
So what do you do? Do you go down to
the courthouse and say, 'You're wrong!
You people are crazy'? We thought that
probably wasn't going to work, so we
decided to try to help out with the dam-
ages." A few days later, acquaintances
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY I, 2010 21